We need to get the male’s genetic material into the female’s body. How many redundant copies should we send. 100? 1000? A voice in back of the room: 50 million.
Survival of the fittest. You don’t guarantee there’s nothing majorly wrong with the sperm that gets through, but by rejecting 99.99% as failing to be the fastest or survive the longest in a harsh environment we can drastically cut down on the issues with the next generation before investing significant resources into trying to form an embryo.
It is just a filter for certain cellular traits. It doesn't filter for many other important traits. A good flagellum doesn't indicate good kidneys. A sperm's existence indicates the father made faithful copies of cells, however the new sperm DNA could be terrible at making faithful copies (ability not proven until after fertilisation).
It also depends on how much of the sperm cell comes from the fathers genes, and how much is generated from the new DNA. I didn't find a clear answer to this but the following indicates that the new sperm cell is at least somewhat generated by the sperm DNA:
Because nucleotide recombinations can occur during meiosis I, the genetic code of chromosomes of gametes can differ from that of somatic parent cells (ie., progeny cells might express cell-surface antigens that are recognized by the host [the father] as foreign and thus be eliminated by humoral or cellular immune mechanisms). Occluding junctions that interconnect adjacent Sertoli cells shield secondary spermatocytes, spermatids, and spermatozoa from autoimmune recognition.
I wonder if there are any organisms where the sperm envelope is made by the dad, and the DNA letter is contained inside?
And I'm completely ignoring the mitochondria (Dad's copy are not passed on so should be mostly irrelevant to sperm selection pressures). I'm pretty ignorant of this whole topic - high school biology only.
The best sperm will likely result in the next generation of sperm also being good.
We look at the human as the organism, the sperm as the gamete - but perhaps our logic is anthropocentric - perhaps the sperm is the organism, and we are just the ridiculously elaborate reproductive mechanism.
I remember something like they may have sexual reproduction and even form blastulas, but the Wiki article is not very clear, so I may be misremembering.
but each chromosome could be "grandfathers" or "grandmothers", and usually those chromosomes have one or two crossover events, so, the chromosome goes FFFFFFFFMM for example. (where F = grandfather and M = grandmother)
Whats interesting to me is that along with the autosomes (chr1-22) the sperm contributes either an X or Y sex chromosome. The X chromosome is large and carries a lot of important genes. The Y chromosome on the other-hand is much smaller and carries very few functional genes (primarily just SRY).
So If you think about it girls get ~5% more genetic material from their father than boys.
I couldn't be assed to do the math, not just chromosome size but also number of genes etc, get's tricky to quantify.
Fascinating to think about the variability introduced by having only a single copy of the X chromosome. Lot's of interesting genes in there, MAOA/MAOB (primary neurotransmitter breakdown pathways), AR (androgen receptor), OPN1LW/OPN1MW (red green color blindness), G6PD, etc.
Yes. Sperm cells are haploid. If the sperm that fertilizes the egg has an X chromosome, the baby will be female. If it has a Y chromosome, the baby will be male.
There are rare exceptions for genetic disorders relating to sex development, but generally speaking the above is true.
I don't think the fittest sperm become the fittest people no. But I do think that seriously fucked up genetic errors will make the sperm cell non-viable. So it's more about creating a floor than getting the creme de la cremepie.
A lot of what's behind that "selection" there is still unknown; in principle all sperm are, more or less, the same.
There's also so many external effects in play that no single sperm cell may actually have a significant advantage over others; e.g. the behavior of the seminal fluid (ph, viscosity), the physical location of the egg, etc.
The cartoonish image of sperm swimming towards the egg is pretty much that ... a cartoon. In reality, they're pretty much drifting and their movement is much more like brownian motion than anything else [1].
Reminds me of this sperm race thing that took the spotlight a month ago, after watching the videos [2] ... come on, man.
Only someone who is extremely ignorant and/or is lacking severely on their mental abilities (bordering on idiocy), would believe that thing was true.
1: When the sperm is really close to the egg, however, there seems to be a hormone gradient that guides the sperm, preferentially, towards it.
There’s a big difference between mostly the same and actually the same. A sperm that doesn’t move is extremely unlikely to fertilize an egg. Thus, 1 is a test for fitness among a tiny percentage of total sperm but still a large number.
Length of survival is dependent on factors largely put side of sperms control, but sperm lifespan does test for massive genetic abnormality.
So yes 99% never get a chance to compete, but meaningful competition still occurs.
IVF has a higher rate of spontaneous abortion which is a more expensive filter for cellular issues. In people losing out on months of reproductive heath is a meaningful downside. In say frogs having a lower percentage of viable eggs is a significant disadvantage.
IVF is also associated with congenital malformations etc. Though it’s hard to separate issues preventing normal conception from issues associated with IVF, it’s likely less viable sperm result in a less healthy fetus.
“can and have” sure not everything that makes sperm look feeble in a microscope actually represents an issue.
Extremely poor is a qualifier that isn’t backed up by your previous statements or actual scientific studies. Further births are very late in the process, rates of success is a critical metric here.
There’s significant research in trying to artificially create similar selection criteria because it increases the odds of a successful pregnancy and live birth. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7365522/
So if you still disagree, how about presenting some actual evidence.
Not really, the reason so many sperm are needed is because a woman's reproductive tract requires an aggressive immunological response to foreign bodies (which sperm are). The vagina provides a direct route for pathogens through the cervix and uterus to the fallopian tubes (which can be scarred by inflammation resulting in infertility) and they themselves open up directly into the peritoneal cavity (potentially exposing a woman to septic shock or death if an infection reaches it). To protect against that, the vaginal environment is highly acidic, has layers of mucus that shields the cervix, and a high concentration of immune cells proliferate throughout. Men need to produce so many sperm because they need to be able to temporarily overwhelm these defenses.
What you say is right, but it does not contradict the parent poster.
Both reasons for the high count of sperm cells are true.
There must be many sperm cells to survive the adverse conditions, but there is also intense competition with the sibling sperm cells.
The DNA of the sperm cells is generated by a random generator, which is the meiosis mechanism, which randomly shuffles then randomly discards half of the father DNA.
The sperm competition then discards the random choices that happened to be bad, implementing an optimum search algorithm.
The sperm competition is only a first filter for rejecting bad random choices. Many embryos will die very soon, without ever developing, rejecting other bad random choices.
>The sperm competition then discards the random choices that happened to be bad, implementing an optimum search algorithm.
Only a very small percentage of sperm (less than 5%) are chromosomally abnormal. Meanwhile, the vast majority of sperm are morphologically abnormal in some way. So there's not really a tight relationship between genetic problems and sperm fitness. Men with infertility due to low motility, for example, are capable of having perfectly healthy children with those low motility sperm through IVF.
>The DNA of the sperm cells is generated by a random generator, which is the meiosis mechanism, which randomly shuffles then randomly discards half of the father DNA.
Meiosis also occurs in women (technically in the female fetus), but women generally produce only a single egg each ovulation.
>Many embryos will die very soon, without ever developing, rejecting other bad random choices.
A very large number of zygotes/blastocysts survive until implantation, upwards of 50%. And of those that do, maybe 20-40% are miscarried before 12 weeks. All things considered, about 1 in every 4 fertilized eggs results in a successful pregnancy.
So yes, it's absolutely true that the body filters out chromosomally abnormal germ cells and zygotes. But an egg is orders of magnitude more likely to survive than a sperm (even if you take into account the eggs that die in the uterus without being released). And the overwhelming reason is that the egg is simply in a much less hostile immune environment.
> So yes, it's absolutely true that the body filters out chromosomally abnormal germ cells and zygotes.
> A very large number of zygotes/blastocysts survive until implantation, upwards of 50%. And of those that do, maybe 20-40% are miscarried before 12 weeks.
That’s with sperm going to a filter process for genetic abnormalities before fertilization. If hypothetically 5% fewer zygotes survived that would have real consequences not just for humans but in terms of increasing variability in litter sizes for mammals with multiple births etc.
as to the large number of sperm required, it is note worthy that excess male germ cell's is the norm for many?, most?, all?, species, and that in
a lot of cases there is a number of complications involved in transfering them to a female, and altogether improbable solutions, also the basic mechanisms for germ cells are conserved by plants and animals, "pollen" bieng tailess sperm.....except in the case of ginko trees, that have motile sperm
so the real questions are around why did evolution produce, and stick to this mechanism, and not so much about our species rather mundane take on it.
It’s not the sperms fault it ends the night on a body instead of someplace useful. Random luck is therefore a filer dropping from millions to thousands without telling you anything about the sperm.
It’s useless for all that multicellular goodness that separates humans from fish. But making viable single cells is a prerequisite for everything that comes after. DNA that can’t make cell walls etc can’t make a person as such there’s a host of genetic anomalies that don’t result in a fetus let alone a live birth.
Wait, but random luck is precisely the thing that breaks this whole "fittest" model since there isn't a selection for fitness! (that was my other major issue I didn't mention with this whole approach)
Add luck doesn't explain millions either, it would sound the same if thousands dropped to hundreds
Random bad luck is always part of any survival of the fittest situation. A meteor killing few thousand trees isn’t something a given tree at the center of the impact crater can do much about.
Also, it’s “fittest” as category not most fit as a ranking. Perhaps a better conceptual model is people who finish a marathon are a fitter group than those who start a marathon even if someone who failed was potentially in better shape than the winner. Many species have thousands of offspring because the odds any one of them reproduces is very low, a valid strategy not some sign of incompetence.
> Add luck doesn't explain millions either, it would sound the same if thousands dropped to hundreds
The actual cause is the full evolutionary history going back to the first life form and the environment each generation lived in, but we can still examine individual elements of what’s going on.
“Luck” is a multiplier on the number of sperm needed. The ability of an individual sperm to optimize its odds of success is a sign of cellular function. There’s zero contradiction between those statements. ~1:10,000 * ~1:100
So the fittest tree dying due to a meteor is *not* survival of the fittest. It's survival of the luckiest. This has nothing about being "fit"/better adapted to the environment.
> Many species have thousands of offspring because the odds any one of them reproduces is very low, a valid strategy not some sign of incompetence.
But having millions instead of thousands that would decrease the chances of survival (for example, by the offspring exhausting food resources and starving) would be a sign of incompetence.
Anyway, this is a different, simpler, argument, it explains "many with low chances", but doesn't explain 50 millions wether thousands would work just fine.
> There’s zero contradiction between those statements
My issue is there is zero connection. You can't justify millions this way.
> The actual cause is the full evolutionary history
That's not a cause, but a description of what happened. There's a lot of irrelevant info in that history. Also a lots of random things with no benefit
> So the fittest tree dying due to a meteor is not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the luckiest. This has nothing about being "fit"/better adapted to the environment.
Again fittest is a classification. In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "survival of the form that in successive generations will leave most copies of itself."
After several generations it could be shown that a tree did have the form of the fittest without itself surviving.
> But having millions instead of thousands that would decrease the chances of survival (for example, by the offspring exhausting food resources and starving) would be a sign of incompetence.
Offspring of many species consume their siblings, millions is generally inefficient for other reasons. Some trees could have millions of viable offspring in their lifetime but random dispersal is really inefficient.
> My issue is there is zero connection. You can't justify millions this way.
I already did.
Odds multiply here, you want competition and also have to contend with random dispersal. 1 in 10,000 * 1 in 100 is 1 in 1 million. It’s very easy to look at the combination of multiple factors and see why millions is an efficient use of resources for animals as large as humans. Trying to argue for a single justification doesn’t work because multiple factors such as our size is involved.
> That's not a cause, but a description of what happened. There's a lot of irrelevant info in that history. Also a lots of random things with no benefit
Randomness is part of evolution. There’s ultimately no particular reason we got the particular version of various mirrored molecules that we did, but once that selection happened it was unlikely to change.
The actual process isn’t just the high level overview we talk about but the actual interplay down to individual subatomic particles. Multiple paths could have resulted in an organism with your specific DNA sequence but only one path actually did result in you existing and having your specific layout of carbon 14 nuclei etc. So argue all you want that an equivalent organism could exist, just realize you’re arbitrarily lowering the threshold between the actual process and a simplified abstraction.
You're basically removing all "fit" from the term, and that's not how Darwin described it, a couple of quotes per wiki:
> "This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest." – Darwin, Charles gqiyoh
> This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection
Dumb meteor luck doesn't care about preserving favorable, doesn't care about any advantage in structure, so there is no fit going on even if you constrain it to a binary classification
So coming back to your first comment, your understanding of "fit" doesn't help *at all* in "drastically cut[ting] down on the issues". You don't cut anything bad if you don't filter out bad/fit for good, but instead have dumb luck making dumb choices.
Those quotes are directly talking about fittest as classification.
“preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest”
“varieties which possess”
Fit in those quotes means having favorable variations and not having injurious variations, at no point does it refer to a specific organism’s survival.
> You don't cut anything bad if you don't filter out bad/fit for good, but instead have dumb luck making dumb choices.
Sperm which successfully fertilize an egg are more likely to have specific characteristics, that’s all that matters here as that alone results in survival of the fittest.
Sperm with identical characteristics die clinging to a sock on your bedroom floor, but they quite literally don’t matter because of the Trillions of sperm being produced. Humans are large animals we can take the minor metabolic hit to produce a for us a trivial number of cells each of which have extraordinarily low odds of success. Producing even more so fertilized eggs have a marginally higher probability of live birth is a winning strategy.
> Sperm which successfully fertilize an egg are more likely to have specific characteristics, that’s all that matters here as that alone results in survival of the fittest.
This is way too generic. Which specific characteristics? How are those "favorable"? How are "injurious" filtered out?
> Producing even more so fertilized eggs have a marginally higher probability of live birth is a winning strategy.
So why not billions? Now try it with the eggs. Why have a few instead of millions? Again, nothing you say here helps you get to 50mil because it's all too generic "the higher the better; not that expensive" argument quality.
And you won't have a higher probability of live birth if your meteor discarding filter don't filter out the defects that decrease this probability
> but they quite literally don’t matter because of the Trillions of sperm being produced
No, they don't matter for this conversation because it's about the meaning in differences in the ability to reach the egg. If every cell has a 0% chance, there is nothing to discuss.
> Which specific characteristics? How are those "favorable"? How are "injurious" filtered out?
Mobility for one, within close distance to an egg the sperm which can orient on the chemical gradient beat out those unable to move.
> So why not billions?
Cost vs benefit
> Now try it with the eggs. Why have a few instead of millions?
Spending more resources on a few fetuses is the chosen strategy. Which would run into issues if both sides released millions of cells. The chemical signaling to abort a large number would be complex at implantation, much simpler to release a limited number of eggs.
Both of which you've failed to quantify, so you have no answer as to why stop at millions and not thousands or billions.
> Mobility for one
Your continue to stop at the most important part - relevance to your own criteria. If you care about probability of live birth or cutting out those unnamed "issues", how do tiny variations in mobility help? What's the mechanism connecting the two?
> Both of which you've failed to quantify, so you have no answer as to why stop at millions and not thousands or billions.
I already quantified it relative to the metabolic cost on an organism the size of a human. There’s a big difference to us between 10 calories (more specifically 5 to 25 calories) and 10,000 there’s not a big difference between 10 calories and 0.01. Thus we spend a relatively but not actually trivial amount of resources for minor benefit.
A fruit fly by necessity operates at a different scale. It would help if you read my posts here.
> How do tiny variations in mobility help.
Mobility is a complex test of a wide range of cellular machinery. Which means that cellular machinery works well.
Lifespan is similarly a great test for the ability to maintain cellular homeostasis.
> I already quantified it relative to the metabolic cost on an organism the size of a human
You haven't, there isn't a single number in that reference. Even now you can't, you completely avoided quantifying the benefit and created a strawman for the costs.
> There’s a big difference to us between 10 calories and 10,000
What about the small difference between 10 and 200? That would move you from 50 mil to 1 bil. What does your "cost/benefit" formula say?
> It would help if you read my posts here.
The opposite - because I did and saw you unable to justify the results even after you tried to expand the original point several times. What would help instead if you tried to focus on a coherent argument instead of making up false claims about the other person.
> Mobility is a complex test of a wide range of cellular machinery. Which means that cellular machinery works well.
So again you have nothing specific to say, what you actually need to prove is that probability of live birth is part of that causal "wide range" of complexity. It could very well be that high mobility comes at the expense of that probability.
Analogy: you can make a car more mobile at the expense of driver safety/comfort while the same generic "mobility complex test wide range engineering machinery" would be true.
> What about the small difference between 10 and 200?
So wait now you want a justification for low millions vs high millions? Trying to move the goalpost isn’t an argument. You wanted justification for why not thousands or billions and I provided it.
That said, 200 is ~10% of daily calorie needs directly plus all the cellular machinery to produce sperm, that’s a big deal especially with some reserves for multiple ejaculations. Isn’t it interesting how science actually provides understanding here.
Falling in substantive arguments in the longer comments you switch to ad hominems to bail out. Timeless tactic. Though not the fittest: silently bailing out could've saved you more typing without degrading your reputation.
There's no way to measure that in sperm, it only has potential. Most humans have similar intellectual capacity, yet they can perform vastly different depending on their environment, so the significant difference is not genetic.
Anyway, few would contest that being smart and strong is better than being smart or strong. Sperm can at least prove they're stronger.
That statement implies it’s a comparison between potential humans, which is not guaranteed at this stage. Sperm unable to result in live birth even if directly inserted into eggs exist in meaningful quantities.
Sperm are normally required to demonstrate they have traits required to produce a human thus making them categorically better from a biological standpoint than Sperm missing those traits.
I'm broadly speculating here, but I tend to view most mechanisms like this as evolution's "desire" for a well tuned, but imperfect, CRC check.
Ignoring whether or not it would even be possible, a perfect CRC is antithetical to evolution itself, wiggle room for mutation must always be possible, but too much mutation gives you cancer and systemic malfunction. So you end up with these bizarre processes that allow just the right amount of imperfection.
With sperm specifically it ends up closer to a signature check than just a CRC, if the sperm doesn't exhibit behavior that falls under a certain umbrella of expected behaviors, it's rejected by the surrounding environment. The difficulty to comprehend it could even be a feature of the process in many respects, especially when you consider everything in this realm risks getting "hacked" if precautions are not put into place.
So when I see huge numbers like this, I see it as an indirect measure of the precision of the overall process. To put it another way, it's like brute forcing a password you don't know, but happen to have a lot of hints to (since obviously, we are all still the same species at the end of the day).
I’ve actually had this question myself, “is there evolutionary pressure for imperfect genetic copying and repair mechanisms, since perfect ones would halt evolution and leave a species unable to adapt?”
I’ve asked this question to multiple evolutionary biologists, and all of them answered “no” very strongly, strongly enough that I’m inclined to believe it. Apparently the frequency of deleterious mutations is many orders of magnitude greater than the frequency of beneficial ones, meaning there’s little chance perfect copying could be maladaptive. And in any event, evolution always selects for the fitness of the individual, not the species— group selection is a controversial topic in evobio, but the general consensus is that it does not happen, and that the rare things which kinda look like group selection (e.g. eusociality in bees) actually aren’t and can be explained without it.
I suspect there could be a misalignment in semantics here, and not necessarily a disagreement. When a biologist says "evolutionary pressure" perhaps they have a different way of modeling what that means to them?
To me evolutionary pressure isn't an on/off thing, it's like a signal in the noise. It's a vector with a direction and magnitude, facing varying levels of environmental resistance.
To be more specific, if there was enough "magnitude", evolution could potentially arrive at a perfect CRC. But the "resistance" requires a "magnitude" higher than evolution is willing to pay to reach that perfection. Likely in part due to the implicit complexity slope. Considering the systemic malfunction mutation can cause, one might assume this magnitude would be higher than it currently is. However, this is entirely speculation, and not falsifiable.
So when I think of evolutionary pressure I'm considering it as a component of the final vector, where a biologist might more pragmatically consider the total sum of vectors instead. This way of thinking is likely more productive for what they are doing.
As for evolution always selecting for the individual over the group, I'm surprised this is controversial when it's so obviously happening? If that was true how could multicellular organisms even exist? I'm very much not an expert on any of this, but this sounds like perhaps an over focus on DNA itself and not evolution as a whole, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something?
> This way of thinking is likely more productive for what they are doing.
Which is… attempting a rigorous understanding of evolutionary biology, rather than idly ruminating.
I hate to use a dork-ism like “update your priors”, but this is actually maybe a situation where it applies? If you’re serious about a subject it’s more interesting to really incorporate the likelihood that you’re wrong than it is to wave it away as semantics or point of view.
I find evolution interesting because I like algorithms, so I view it through that lens. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this perspective. Clarifying my mental model is by no means simple hand waving.
Tell me this, which is more productive in an open discussion? My idle rumination? Or the lazy dismissal that lacks any substantive contribution to the ongoing discussion? I can't help but agree with your distaste for "dorkisms".
Imperfect copying is only one reason for having to reject many sperm cells, and a less important one.
Meiosis, which produces both the sperm cells and the egg cells, is not a copying mechanism, unlike mitosis, which generates the other cells of a body.
Meiosis is a random generator, it randomly shuffles the DNA of the grandparents, which is stored in the father's cells, then it randomly selects half of it, producing a unique combination of genes in each sperm cell or egg cell.
The random genome generator together with the following filtering steps that will reject the bad variants, implement an optimum search algorithm for the fittest descendants.
Meiosis has greatly accelerated the evolution of the nucleated living beings (eukaryotes). Because favorable mutations are extremely rare, the probability of a living being accumulating multiple favorable mutations would have been negligible. With meiosis, if in a population 5 individuals have 1 favorable mutation each, there are good chances that soon some individuals will appear who have all 5 favorable mutations, then their descendants may become dominant and replace all others.
> And in any event, evolution always selects for the fitness of the individual, not the species— group selection is a very controversial topic in evobio, but the general consensus is that it does not happen
To me that seems more to me like a group of academics who just can’t see “how” it’d work. We’ve seen that in field after field where practitioners rarely look outside their own field.
There’s no “magic” in evolution to make it work only on individuals. Evolution is going to follow game theory. In some scenarios the evolution of the group will over time be far more adaptive than that of an individual. It’s a math question, not a biology question.
This is one of those issues where I think that the experts in the field saying that are just plain wrong. I know how that is a bad assumption to start out with; but I also know that obviously there is an amount of mutations that is beneficial, and organisms with a rate lower than that will be outcompeted. It could be no other way.
So is it just misunderstanding? Maybe they don't understand the question, or we don't understand the answer? Or they're hidebound, or incentivized somehow to be blind to the truth? Epistemological questions abound.
But there are also Microsatellites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsatellite#Mutation_mechan... that are repeated sequences in the DNA. It's difficult to copy the correct number of repetitions, so they have a higher mutation rate. It's like like a controlled localized increased rate of mutation.
A better way to think about it is just how much surface area of uterus the ovum could actually be in.
It's not that you need millions of sperm or that millions of sperm are competing, its that those sorts of numbers are necessary just to make it probably at least 1 sperm even finds the egg while it's still got energy.
Sperm are actually quite good at finding the egg if they make it to the fallopian tube, they have their own chemoreceptors that can detect very small changes in chemical gradients, but only a few hundred make it through the preceding gauntlet.
There's this fascinating phenomenon called "micro chimerism"where somehow they've found that some of the cells in women's bodies are actually descendents of cells from past sexual partners, and they can be found in places far removed from the reproductive tract. the relation to your comment is that the tonsils and throat are known to be susceptible to this.
Fun rabbit hole, in since cases they think it's the result of cells from offspring winding up in the wrong side of the umbilical but there are also cases where there was never a pregnancy in which case it has to be wayward sperm but that's absolutely bizarre and far too orthogonal to the sperms primary objective.
And AFAIK they don't have any idea of why this is beneficial to the woman or even to the man who created the invasive cells.
...Huh. So does this increased biodiversity mean that I have, perhaps, stronger immune defenses or quicker healing in certain oral tissues due to hybrid vigor[1] in the back of my throat?
This is cool but I feel like typing speed and vim skills are going to play less of a role in overall development speed as AI use increases. But certainly it won’t hurt to type fast, even if it’s mostly typing prompts.
> typing speed and vim skills are going to play less of a role in overall development speed as AI use increases
I feel like it will always be relevant. Both typing fast and vim.
I always bet on vim / neovim.
Even as tools like Cursor and Windsurf grow, Neovim will always catch up and beat them. Developer attitude of “I can do it better” or “I can build that” will always compete with leading tech products. Tools like aider are already gaining large adoption
I also started in the 1990’s and agree the evolution has been as you describe it. It does highly depend on where you work, but the tightly managed JIRA-driven development seems awfully popular.
But I fall short of declaring the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s were the glory days and now things suck. I think part of it is nostalgia bias. I can think of a job I spent 4 years and list all the good parts of the experience. But I suspect I’m forgetting over a lot of mediocre or negative stuff.
At any rate I still like the work today. There are still generally hard challenges that you can overcome, people that depend on you, new technologies to learn about. Generically good stuff.
Thanks for pointing out JIRA. I think the problem comes from needing to keep the codebase running next month while trying to up scalars / numbers, not thinking years ahead or how to improve both inside culture and outside image of a company which are more complex structures with lots of little metrics and interdependent components than a win/loss output or an issue tracker that ignores the fact issues solved != issues prevented.
I guess these strategies boil down to having some MBA on top or an engineer that has no board of MBAs to bow down to. I strive to stay with private owned companies for this reason but ofc these are less loud on the internet, so you can easily miss them while jobhunting.
Ex-cobol guy here, the work was a blast! I was working on the Lawson erp for a non-profit, mostly customizing the software for their specific use case. I loved it because the tools were crazy, the language limited, and the system itself was high value to the org. Debugging took forever but the fixes were often really small changes. I often had to go into the database (oracle) and clean up the data by hand. Such fun!
I crave novelty and have a love for bad technology. I was an early nodejs adopter and loved es4 but newer versions of the language is too easy to use lol!
Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead.
The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer. But "work for yourself" probably means direct competition with others who are just as expert as you with AI, so that's no panacea.
The first is that the entire global codebase starts to become an unstable shitpile, and eventually critical infrastructure starts collapsing in a kind of self-inflicted Y2k event. Experienced developers will be rehired at astronomical rates to put everything back together, and then everyone will proceed more cautiously. (Perhaps.)
The second is that AI is just about good enough and things muddle along in a not-great-not-terrible way. Dev status and salaries drop slowly, profits increase, reliability and quality are both down, but not enough to cause serious problems.
The third is that the shitpile singularity is avoided because AI gets much better at coding much more quickly, and rapidly becomes smarter than human devs. It gets good enough to create smart specs with a better-than-human understanding of edge cases, strategy, etc, and also good enough to implement clean code from those specs.
If this happens development as we know it would end, because the concept of a codebase would become obsolete. The entire Internet would become dynamic and adaptive, with code being generated in real time as requirements and condition evolve.
I'm sure this will happen eventually, but current LLMs are hilariously short of it.
So for now there's a gap between what CEOs believe is happening - option 3. And what is really happening - option 1.
I think a shitpile singularity is quite likely within a couple of years. But if there's any sane management left it may just about be possible to steer into option 2.
I agree with you three scenarios. But I would assign different probabilities. I think the second option is the most likely. Things will get shittier and cheaper. Third option might not ever come to pass.
Just like clothing and textile work. They are getting cheaper and cheaper, true, but even with centuries of automation, they are still getting shittier in the process.
There are many more scenarios, though. One of them is that AI slop is impressive looking to outsiders, but can't produce anything great on itself, and, after the first wave of increased use based on faith, it just gets tossed in the pile of tools somewhere above UML and Web Services. Something that many people use because "it's the standard" but generally despise because it's crap.
The whole thing with gen AI is so depressing to me.
For the first time now I can feel the joy of what I do slipping away from me. I don't even mind my employer capturing more productivity, but I do mind if all the things I love about the job are done by robots instead.
Maybe I'm in the minority but I love writing code! I love writing tests! If I wanted to ask for this stuff to be done for me, I would be a manager!
Now, I'll need to use gen AI to replace the fun part of the job, or I'll be put out to pasture.
It's not a future I look forward to, even if I'm able to keep up and continue working in the industry.
The fun part for me was coming up with ideas for new things, then architecting those things, creating the high level systems to implement them, and iterating on them to make them better. Figuring out why some test harness wasn't mocking some random thing correctly, remembering which api call had which syntax, or just writing a bajillion almost-boilerplate endpoints was always drudgery and I'm glad to be rid of it.
Another game is to distribute the gains from increased productivity more equally. E.g. in Europe as late as early 2000s working hours were reduced in response to technological development. But since then the response even from workers seems to be to demand increasingly shittier bullshit jobs to keep people busy.
Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.
> you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was)
Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are not affected negatively by technological progress over the span of their entire careers, you're just lazily talking shit.
If it's the solution, so much easier than keeping ahead of the technology treadmill, and it's so obvious to you, it's strange that you haven't set up the One Big Union yet and fixed all the problems.
> "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual.
Right, but the observation here is that many, maybe most, individuals in a particular field are having this same problem of labor autonomy and exploitation. So... unions are pretty good for that.
SWE is somewhat unique in that, despite us being the lowest level assembly-line type worker in our field, we get paid somewhat well. Yes, we're code monkeys, but well-paid code monkeys. With a hint of delusions of grandeur.
I'm talking about labor theory of value vis-a-vis this comment
> Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique
Ie "capitalists" are not rewarded for deploying capital and mitigating risk but for extracting as much from the labor as possible.
And yes Marx is absolutely the "originator" of these ideas and yes absolutely you ask any orthodox economist (and many random armchair economists on here) they will deny it till they're blue in the face. In fact you're doing it now :)
Edit: it's the same thing that plagues the rest of American civil society: "voting against your [communal] interests because someone convinced you that your exceptional". Ie who needs unions when I'm a 10x innovator/developer. Well I guess enjoy your LLM overlords then Mr 10x <shrug>.
Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power. Whether that’s the employee or the employer is going to depend on the exact circumstances (realistically it will be some mix). Hence why factory workers today get paid more than in the 1800s (and factory owners as well!)
> Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power.
That's true. And employers have been consistently the one with more bargaining power, and that's why our wages haven't kept up with the productivity gains. This is also known as productivity-pay-gap.
We, the working class, are supposed to be paid roughly 50% more than we are paid now, if the gains from productivity were properly distributed. But they are not, concentrated to a large extent in the owning class, which is what's unfair and why we, the workers, should unite to get what's rightfully ours.
Interesting to see A imagine what B meant, then assert that A believes some metric will always go up because they always saw it go up? It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.
I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to. But even if it weren't (admittedly you have to have actually read Marx for it to jump out at you) by the time you responded there was another comment that very clearly spells it out, complete with citations.
right; the "ancap" mentality in computing could only last for so long. Eventually, and especially with the refusal of incorporating any ethics or humanity into it, it's now an established industry affecting all walks of life just like every other that has preceded it, and the belief that its technological superiority/uniqueness was a good reason to essentially exempt it from regulation (TV broadcasts for children are required to have "bumper" sections that would clearly define the show vs the advertisement; Why was computing/the internet treated differently? A high-horse mentality that stemmed from "complexity olympics"? no child could ever use or comprehend a sophisticated machine like this!!) has really fucked us. The labor is decentralized at such a scale that I also have a hard time believing anything could be rectified; open source software is mostly just corporate welfare, putting anything at all on the internet has become corporate welfare, and there is no real purpose or goal for building all of this. The computer was supposed to allow us to do less work, right?
> But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer
Or, you know, being a member of society, you can find other members of society who feel like you, and organize together to place demands on employers that...you know...stops them from exploiting you.
But, you know, you can always hustle against your fellow SEs, and try to appease your masters. Where others work the bare minimum of 8 hours, why not work 12, and also on the weekend? It's also fine.
Generating shareholder value is very important for the well-being of society! /s
Should I be worried about the shareholders? While we are it, how about also removing the few environmental regulations and worker protection laws we still have, just so the poor poor shareholders can buy another yacht? /s
"Stonks go up" is not a proxy for success. Success is when pharma executives don't tremble like the villains they are from hearing the name of Mario's little brother. Success is when normal people get from the social contract at least as much as they put in. If we, the people, get less than from the social contract that we put in, as we nowadays observe, I can guarantee you we will break down the social contract, and the ones having most to lose from that are your precious stakeholders.
By all means “organize together to place demands on your employers”. I didn’t say don’t do that. But there are 24 hours in a day — maybe strive to be good at your job AND organize instead of doing just one or the other?
I'd argue we'll be better at our jobs if we took pride in our craft and were treated with dignity and respect rather than like replaceable cogs in a machine that have to compete with one another to stay "competitive".
I'm the OP, and I think of it as more "completely and utterly inevitable" than "needed." Given our personalities and history, the promise of curing all diseases, along with many other promises, will compel us forward. But whether or not we'll look back and say it was the right move, I don't think anyone knows for sure.
Do you genuinely believe those 4 years were spent writing code?
This is why wet behind the ears tech boys can't be trusted any more. They really think that the hardest part of software, the thing that slows us down, is writing code. Really!?
Kid, I'll offer you some free advice. Writing the code is the least difficult part. Deciding what and how to write (and what not to bother with) is a critical step that has nothing to do with writing code. Designing the architecture, ensuring it's correct, leaving something well written and maintainable for the next grunt, documenting code so it's easy to understand and to review, ensuring your code supports all the desired use cases and interactions with users and other code/apps/etc, iterating on it until it's polished, and then actually maintaining it and fixing bugs that are inevitably going to be there if the code is sufficiently expansive. Those are just a few of the things that aren't "grinding code" as you want to make software.
Read a programming book for Pete's sake, and stop assuming you can just fake it till you make it because you are part of what's destroying software for the world and it's got to stop.
Sincere question: what do you believe should happen when a company becomes successful?
You make excellent criticisms and I've had similar thoughts. But I never really understood what people want to do other than confiscate companies once they become successful. Not saying that is what you want to do - you specifically say not that.
You mention "let’s engineer a network of trust and monitoring and a culture of transparency". I'm not sure what that means.
In the post, I say private individuals can own assets in two ways, as individuals (up to a cap) or through a personal corporation (no cap).
So, if you start a company that becomes huge and your slice is worth $100 billion, or even $10 trillion, you can still own all of that via the personal corporation. And you can invest or spend all of it [almost] however you want.
The difference is that the personal corporation has oversight; I only specify there will be a "board" I don't have anything concrete beyond that.
But the idea is in extreme circumstances, the board can over-rule your money-related decisions. The intent is they will only step in if you are going nuts, but the devil is in the details of how exactly to do that. It might be impossible, but I'd rather see us at least try rather have brain-damaged trillionaires causing unchecked mayhem.
When I make this argument, people assume I want to tax or seize the billionaire's wealth, but no, I'm saying they can keep every penny. Although to be fair, if you did cleave apart people's finances like this, taxing the "personal corporation" higher than the individual portion would be tempting.
The board can and should be friendly with the p-corp owner. Almost all the time they are going to be green light everything. They are really just a "sanity check" (literally).
Now you could say how do we "make sure" the board acts when the time comes? Stands up to the owner? Maybe we don't. We put the mechanism in place, and if the board fails to stop the owner, then it didn't work in that specific case. And the world will know that. But as long as it works "most" of the time maybe that's enough.
Also I forgot, apart from a board a big thing might be reporting. Your p-corp activities would have much more stringent reporting requirements compared to a private individual. You can do anything you want with your $300M in private funds, including get it as small bills and roll around in it, but the p-corp funds need to be much more closely monitored. That alone, even without a board, would be big.
It sounds like you are also libertarian, but you argue that even libertarian societies should have some form of public interest limitation, license or oversight. This is in line with traditional Thomas Jefferson thinking: "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
That's a nice thought but the problem, as we've now shown, is that any organization of humans will by definition become corrupted, the state will grow unless constrained, and any system is imperfect and can be gamed.
What is the place of the state, traditionally empowered through a monopoly on violence, in a multinational world? Right now, it's just a tool to be abused by the wealthy, and by extension to confound and entrap the masses. Can you believe they still teach nationalism? Populism should have been excised from education after the 20th century's tragedies, but instead it seems to have redoubled.
In future perhaps we'll have a dictatorship of AI to keep the humans in check, but the clear danger is that such a system would present too much value not to be usurped and abused.
Democracy in the utopian theoretical sense was supposed to be based upon popular education and representation. We could work towards improving the former with AI and more effective (not child minding oriented) personalized education programs, and the latter with more frequent referendums. Right now we have the opposite: laziness, lack of education, active misinformation, and near zero viable means for meaningful representation even in self-labelled democractic societies. It is no wonder so many people self-medicate.
I don't think using AI to write code precludes learning deeply about the problem domain and even the solution. However, it could lead to those problems depending on how it's done. But done well you can still have a very knowledgeable team that understands the domain and large portions of the code, I believe anyway.
I think software engineers will drift towards only understanding the domain and creating tasks and then reviewing code written by AI. But the reviews will be necessary and will matter, at least for a while.
The best programmers eventually become experts in a problem domain they’ve worked on, because to teach a computer to automate a process well requires thinking like an expert and resolving incoherences. Weak programmers complain stakeholders don’t know what they want or that there’s no spec; I have a hunch these are going to be replaced by AI.
